I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
I just asked my German girlfriend. Her first answer was, the nazis didn't invent it, it was standard military dress for a long time in Prussia/Germany. When I asked "but why?" she replied "Keine Ahnung" i.e. no idea.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Here's one I shot earlier for Germany. Unfortunately my model is not available at the moment!
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Care to point me towards some academic papers to back up that unsubstantiated claim?
At which point I will be sorely tempted to head to bed to wake early and enjoy the fun from say 6 am. But I will probably open a new bottle of whisky and settle in…
I am tempted to do similar. Go to bed at 10pm sharp and wake up at 3-4am for a flurry of results.
But I will inevitably stay awake until 2am, see a few early results, then wake up at 6am tired and having missed most the action!
As the results will be 1 hour later for me your plan is even more enticing. But I know I have absolutely no chance of getting to sleep once I have heard the exit poll tresults at 11 pm (CET).
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Especially if one is wearing jackboots in the first place.
Has anyone read the manifestos? Just realised that I haven't, and normally I do. Standards are slipping. 😊
I would be happy to repost my summaries of the LD, Tory, Green, SDP, Labour, and Reform manifestos.
However, they do run to over 10000 words.
I can summarize all of them in a few words "We are talking bollocks"
Sure, it is easy to be cynical about it, since a lot of it will be fluff, aspirational (meaning not going to happen), circumstances dependent, or vague to the point of uselessness.
But it's still an opportunity to see what the parties believe to be the most significant issues, and how they present that issue and potential solutions (or do not present or offer such solutions) will play a role in how they take action or defend action in the future, even though it will not be the most significant factor.
To take an example, the Tories did not promise or explain that they would be changing mayoral voting systems to FPTP in 2019. But they did say they would defend it, and that factored into how they justified making the change despite not having it as an actual pledge.
Labour's manifesto has a few clear promises which they must either believe to be achievable and which can be used against them if not, but otherwise a lot of vagueness and generalities, giving weight to some critics saying there are many things they might ended up doing. It's first main section was about national security and strong borders, which shows us something about how they sought to change their image.
The LDs opened on the economy, the Greens on housing of all things, and so on. It tells us something at least about focus.
At which point I will be sorely tempted to head to bed to wake early and enjoy the fun from say 6 am. But I will probably open a new bottle of whisky and settle in…
I am tempted to do similar. Go to bed at 10pm sharp and wake up at 3-4am for a flurry of results.
But I will inevitably stay awake until 2am, see a few early results, then wake up at 6am tired and having missed most the action!
I will have a 'watch along' with some old uni mates on Discord til 1am then get up at 7am to see if I've lost the house (I'm joking)
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
Ah yes, Alice Perkins who lives in New Zealand now and, amazingly, refused to cooperate with the inquiry, even though it would been easy to do so via video link.
You're mixing her up with Jane MacLeod, Andy, but both should be charged, and Macleod extradited if necessary.
Has anyone read the manifestos? Just realised that I haven't, and normally I do. Standards are slipping. 😊
I would be happy to repost my summaries of the LD, Tory, Green, SDP, Labour, and Reform manifestos.
However, they do run to over 10000 words.
You could feed it to one of those machines and get a 500 word summary in 3 seconds
REFORM UK 200 words:
Certainly! The Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, has launched its manifesto for the 2024 general election, titled “Our Contract With You.” Here are some key policies:
Immigration: Reform UK aims to freeze non-essential immigration, with exceptions for healthcare workers. It plans to ban students from bringing partners and children to the UK. The party also pledges to address small boats smuggling migrants across the Channel.
Tax Cuts: The party proposes significant tax cuts for small businesses, including a corporation tax-free allowance of £100k in profits and raising the VAT registration threshold for businesses to £150k. Business rates would be abolished for small and medium-sized firms on the high street, funded by a 4% online delivery tax for large multinationals.
Climate Targets: Reform UK would scrap net-zero targets, claiming it could save £30 billion annually. It also plans to stop paying interest on bonds held at the Bank of England, resulting in a £35 billion annual raid on banks123. In summary, Reform UK’s manifesto focuses on immigration control, tax relief for small businesses, and challenging climate targets. However, critics argue that some policies may be hard to implement14. 🗳️
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
Although Gaza has been much less in the news during the campaign, which may help.
Those who care most about it will have seen it a lot on alternative media no doubt.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Here's one I shot earlier for Germany. Unfortunately my model is not available at the moment!
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
I think the video revealed by channel 4 today will give many pause for thought.......it's not pretty. I say this as someone who wanted them as the main opposition.
I sincerely apologise to all muppets. Stating you were the equivalent of Reform voters was grossly unfair.
I'm afraid they are our Deplorables - unPC though it is to say it.
You critisise the politicians, you don’t critise the voters. Ask Hillary Clinton.
But this is me. I'm not running for anything. I can tell the truth.
Besides, Hillary Clinton was completely right in what she said and its not why she lost.
She lost because she was an awful campaigner who totally ignored the electoral college and didn't do enough campaigning in the swing flyover states. She spent more time on the coast than in the states that would decide the election.
Biden didn't make the same mistake, so he won a much healthier electoral college vote.
Biden will concentrate on the key states again this year. He knows what he's doing in a way Hillary didn't, which is funny considering her husband's background as Governor of Arkansas and then some other job.
... and that Hillary had made exactly the same error when losing the nomination to Barack Obama in 2008.
ETA scooped by SSI2
My favourites in Hillary vs Trump
1) taking a two week holiday in the Hamptons during the middle of the campaign. 2) blowing off an arranged event with the teaching unions to do a paid speech to Goldman Sucks.
Even David Cameron lost 18-24s in 2010 and 2015, if you are that age you normally either vote Labour or Green as a protest vote, if you are voting Tory you are normally considered a Hague like oddball.
It didn't used to be that way. It is not inevitable it must always be that way, unless they accept it to be so.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
I think the British army in 1939 was the only fully motorised one.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Care to point me towards some academic papers to back up that unsubstantiated claim?
No academic papers but an anecdote certainly. I worked for a division of ici there were about 400 lab staff developing products about 1500 plant staff manufacturing staff. Lab staff were a scarce resource they had trouble recruiting. Plant staff not so much as they were asking 3 o levels or so.....every year or payrise got capped by what the union could negotiate for plant staff else plant staff went on strike. Result being plant staff happy, replacing lab staff not so easy and eventually got to a point where they couldn't so sold the division who immediately sacked all the plant people and moved manufacturing to german. Lab staff were sacked about six months later after knowledge transfer.
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
I'm sure they'll survive it.
Who will they lose their seats to though? Greens? Galloway's mob?
It just means their vote is becoming more efficient.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Here's one I shot earlier for Germany. Unfortunately my model is not available at the moment!
That can't be one of yours there is a lack of tampons
I tried to get him to wear a tampon but he wouldn't so we did it without.
Always handy to have in case he had a nose bleed
Is that add with the rather large Ice skating woman one of yours then ?
My second most hated current advert. Closely behind the dreadful blond Irish woman selling washing powder by exploiting her kids. Do they get paid? A nation is (not) desperate to know.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
I just asked my German girlfriend. Her first answer was, the nazis didn't invent it, it was standard military dress for a long time in Prussia/Germany. When I asked "but why?" she replied "Keine Ahnung" i.e. no idea.
Standard cavalry dress pretty much everywhere until the tank replaced the horse. I think it was also a proxy for a kind of military elitism which was adopted wholesale by eg many airforces, and obviously attractive to fascists.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Especially if one is wearing jackboots in the first place.
The boots are donned after the breeches. Jackboot seems to mean just riding boot but with reinforcement
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
Presumably to give extra mobility when one is on the saddle and in jackboots - nowhere else to put the looser material. No lycra in those days (the mind boggles as to how they would have taken to Lycra, but probably they'd have preferred some sort of modern Fleckmuster or DPM).
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Care to point me towards some academic papers to back up that unsubstantiated claim?
No academic papers but an anecdote certainly. I worked for a division of ici there were about 400 lab staff developing products about 1500 plant staff manufacturing staff. Lab staff were a scarce resource they had trouble recruiting. Plant staff not so much as they were asking 3 o levels or so.....every year or payrise got capped by what the union could negotiate for plant staff else plant staff went on strike. Result being plant staff happy, replacing lab staff not so easy and eventually got to a point where they couldn't so sold the division who immediately sacked all the plant people and moved manufacturing to german. Lab staff were sacked about six months later after knowledge transfer.
Go collective bargaining
All that says is the Lab staff needed a union and / or ICI management were incompetent (again something we already know).
But that anecdote isn’t about collective pay it’s about the consequences of incompetent management
Remember a lot of companies have unions were for many years (until equal pay rules get very inflexible) warehouse staff were paid more than shop floor staff in the same building .
Has anyone read the manifestos? Just realised that I haven't, and normally I do. Standards are slipping. 😊
I would be happy to repost my summaries of the LD, Tory, Green, SDP, Labour, and Reform manifestos.
However, they do run to over 10000 words.
You could feed it to one of those machines and get a 500 word summary in 3 seconds
REFORM UK 200 words:
Certainly! The Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, has launched its manifesto for the 2024 general election, titled “Our Contract With You.” Here are some key policies:
Immigration: Reform UK aims to freeze non-essential immigration, with exceptions for healthcare workers. It plans to ban students from bringing partners and children to the UK. The party also pledges to address small boats smuggling migrants across the Channel.
Tax Cuts: The party proposes significant tax cuts for small businesses, including a corporation tax-free allowance of £100k in profits and raising the VAT registration threshold for businesses to £150k. Business rates would be abolished for small and medium-sized firms on the high street, funded by a 4% online delivery tax for large multinationals.
Climate Targets: Reform UK would scrap net-zero targets, claiming it could save £30 billion annually. It also plans to stop paying interest on bonds held at the Bank of England, resulting in a £35 billion annual raid on banks123. In summary, Reform UK’s manifesto focuses on immigration control, tax relief for small businesses, and challenging climate targets. However, critics argue that some policies may be hard to implement14. 🗳️
It didn't mention that it relies on annualised savings of £150bn, including £50bn per year from cutting departmental spending by £5 in every £100, but it is so outlandish I can understand why.
(Not that there is not still waste, but if it were that easy to do there'd already be a lot less of it).
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
I think the British army in 1939 was the only fully motorised one.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
True, but the bigger problems was a complete lack of modern communications through the army, a plan for war based on 1915-1917 (trenches mark II) and a massive reluctance to, you know, actually fight.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
I think the British army in 1939 was the only fully motorised one.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
True, but the bigger problems was a complete lack of modern communications through the army, a plan for war based on 1915-1917 (trenches mark II) and a massive reluctance to, you know, actually fight.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Care to point me towards some academic papers to back up that unsubstantiated claim?
No academic papers but an anecdote certainly. I worked for a division of ici there were about 400 lab staff developing products about 1500 plant staff manufacturing staff. Lab staff were a scarce resource they had trouble recruiting. Plant staff not so much as they were asking 3 o levels or so.....every year or payrise got capped by what the union could negotiate for plant staff else plant staff went on strike. Result being plant staff happy, replacing lab staff not so easy and eventually got to a point where they couldn't so sold the division who immediately sacked all the plant people and moved manufacturing to german. Lab staff were sacked about six months later after knowledge transfer.
Go collective bargaining
All that says is the Lab staff needed a union and / or ICI management were incompetent (again something we already know).
But that anecdote isn’t about collective pay it’s about the consequences of incompetent management
What good would a union do and we did have one MSF.....if the plant staff walked out management had to cave
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
The only problem with 10 years of socialist government is that it isn't 20 years of socialist government.
I know you are a natural conservative, but we aren't really that scary. We want a better society, where all can prosper. A nation at ease with itself. And, importantly to you, we are fundamentally Unionist. It is the SNP who have raised your taxes, not us!
Don't believe all of the nonsense being spewed out by Sunak and the children at CCHQ (I don't think you do); a Labour government, in the hands of a lawyer and a city insider, in the form of Starmer and Reeves, isn't going to do anything madcap. And, with a "super-majority", they can ignore the lefty fringe on the back benches. Twenty rebels? So what?
You should also be contented in the demise of the SNP, something to be repeated in the next Holyrood elections, I suspect.
The conservatives will regroup. It will take a decade, but a sensible centre-right alternative to Labour will re-emerge. The Tories won't be controlled by Farage; perhaps by Priti or Suella in the short term, but common sense will prevail. You'll get your party back.
Much in that I agree with. Particularly the breaking of the SNP monopoly in Scotland. I also agree Starmer and Reeves are no Corbyn and Macdonald. I expect quite centrist policies from them.
I also think the Tories are intellectually exhausted and need a break. But you can still have too much of a good thing!
"monopoly"
As a good Unionist, you should be looking at Westminster as a whole. As for Holyrood, if this is a monopoly, what happ[ens when it isn't a minority administration, I wonder?
Anyone who thinks it a monopoly hasn't got a clue. It's just a person trying to scrabble around for something bad to say because they got the wrong result. Sorry, but it's an operation with diminishing returns to complain about one party doing well because they're popular. If there one thing to connect four opposition parties it's that they haven't been able to get over losing so many elections in a row.
Isn’t Scotland simply the maths of one party on one side of a political divide and multiple parties on the other. Something which gives extreme results in FPTP but is also helpful in PR as coalitions are easier.
The question is whether that’s a stable equilibrium. The Conservatives have benefited from this pattern in England and Wales since Brexit and arguably for much of the post-war period, but Reform potentially disrupts it. So far Alba and the Scottish Greens haven’t really disrupted the SNP hegemony but will someone eventually? In this social media era I think it’s more likely than not.
We could call this Zuma’s law. The tendency that if one party enjoys control of one half of a political divide, it will eventually face a challenger on its own side. Zuma’s law because eventually, after a few decades of ANC rule, its control of black majority votes in S Africa is starting to fracture.
Not if the polling is to be believed. There was considerable movement from Labour to SNP in 2015, and now some of that looks like it's washing back.
My take is that it's a die-hard anti-Tory vote that has seen the SNP as the best anti-Tory vehicle and is now divided between SNP and Labour as the best vehicle.
It looks likely that the votes for indy parties will come in well under the support that indy has. This is only a surprise if you think Scottish votes are motivated only by for/against indy.
Makes you wonder what might happen if the anti-Tory motive is removed, i.e. the Conservative Party sinks, doesn't recover and is replaced by something else that Scots might find more palatable?
The increasing doctrinal split between Slab and SKSLab is something to keep an eye on. May not come to much, but even 1-2 years ago they had to advocate *SNP* policies to win a by election. And SKS has moved more to the Tory side since.
The two-child cap for child benefit is such a "wedge" issue between Lab and SLab
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
The only problem with 10 years of socialist government is that it isn't 20 years of socialist government.
I know you are a natural conservative, but we aren't really that scary. We want a better society, where all can prosper. A nation at ease with itself. And, importantly to you, we are fundamentally Unionist. It is the SNP who have raised your taxes, not us!
Don't believe all of the nonsense being spewed out by Sunak and the children at CCHQ (I don't think you do); a Labour government, in the hands of a lawyer and a city insider, in the form of Starmer and Reeves, isn't going to do anything madcap. And, with a "super-majority", they can ignore the lefty fringe on the back benches. Twenty rebels? So what?
You should also be contented in the demise of the SNP, something to be repeated in the next Holyrood elections, I suspect.
The conservatives will regroup. It will take a decade, but a sensible centre-right alternative to Labour will re-emerge. The Tories won't be controlled by Farage; perhaps by Priti or Suella in the short term, but common sense will prevail. You'll get your party back.
Much in that I agree with. Particularly the breaking of the SNP monopoly in Scotland. I also agree Starmer and Reeves are no Corbyn and Macdonald. I expect quite centrist policies from them.
I also think the Tories are intellectually exhausted and need a break. But you can still have too much of a good thing!
"monopoly"
As a good Unionist, you should be looking at Westminster as a whole. As for Holyrood, if this is a monopoly, what happ[ens when it isn't a minority administration, I wonder?
Anyone who thinks it a monopoly hasn't got a clue. It's just a person trying to scrabble around for something bad to say because they got the wrong result. Sorry, but it's an operation with diminishing returns to complain about one party doing well because they're popular. If there one thing to connect four opposition parties it's that they haven't been able to get over losing so many elections in a row.
Isn’t Scotland simply the maths of one party on one side of a political divide and multiple parties on the other. Something which gives extreme results in FPTP but is also helpful in PR as coalitions are easier.
The question is whether that’s a stable equilibrium. The Conservatives have benefited from this pattern in England and Wales since Brexit and arguably for much of the post-war period, but Reform potentially disrupts it. So far Alba and the Scottish Greens haven’t really disrupted the SNP hegemony but will someone eventually? In this social media era I think it’s more likely than not.
We could call this Zuma’s law. The tendency that if one party enjoys control of one half of a political divide, it will eventually face a challenger on its own side. Zuma’s law because eventually, after a few decades of ANC rule, its control of black majority votes in S Africa is starting to fracture.
Not if the polling is to be believed. There was considerable movement from Labour to SNP in 2015, and now some of that looks like it's washing back.
My take is that it's a die-hard anti-Tory vote that has seen the SNP as the best anti-Tory vehicle and is now divided between SNP and Labour as the best vehicle.
It looks likely that the votes for indy parties will come in well under the support that indy has. This is only a surprise if you think Scottish votes are motivated only by for/against indy.
Makes you wonder what might happen if the anti-Tory motive is removed, i.e. the Conservative Party sinks, doesn't recover and is replaced by something else that Scots might find more palatable?
The increasing doctrinal split between Slab and SKSLab is something to keep an eye on. May not come to much, but even 1-2 years ago they had to advocate *SNP* policies to win a by election. And SKS has moved more to the Tory side since.
The two-child cap for child benefit is such a "wedge" issue between Lab and SLab
It was precisely one such issue at the by election in question.
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
Send people from Bangladesh home not winning votes in my local "Indian" tonight.
Do you think people coming here illegally from Bangladesh should be allowed to stay?
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Care to point me towards some academic papers to back up that unsubstantiated claim?
I think it's made-up nonsense
AFAIK, there are three possible objectives for unions: Maximise 1) the number of people in employment 2) the total pay to workers 3) the average pay per worker
So it's possible that Unions have cost some individuals some money if they tried to achieve options 1 or 2. There are good arguments for all 3, depending on the economic circumstance.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
I think the video revealed by channel 4 today will give many pause for thought.......it's not pretty. I say this as someone who wanted them as the main opposition.
I sincerely apologise to all muppets. Stating you were the equivalent of Reform voters was grossly unfair.
I'm afraid they are our Deplorables - unPC though it is to say it.
You critisise the politicians, you don’t critise the voters. Ask Hillary Clinton.
But this is me. I'm not running for anything. I can tell the truth.
Besides, Hillary Clinton was completely right in what she said and its not why she lost.
She lost because she was an awful campaigner who totally ignored the electoral college and didn't do enough campaigning in the swing flyover states. She spent more time on the coast than in the states that would decide the election.
Biden didn't make the same mistake, so he won a much healthier electoral college vote.
Biden will concentrate on the key states again this year. He knows what he's doing in a way Hillary didn't, which is funny considering her husband's background as Governor of Arkansas and then some other job.
... and that Hillary had made exactly the same error when losing the nomination to Barack Obama in 2008.
ETA scooped by SSI2
My favourites in Hillary vs Trump
1) taking a two week holiday in the Hamptons during the middle of the campaign. 2) blowing off an arranged event with the teaching unions to do a paid speech to Goldman Sucks.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
I think the British army in 1939 was the only fully motorised one.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
True, but the bigger problems was a complete lack of modern communications through the army, a plan for war based on 1915-1917 (trenches mark II) and a massive reluctance to, you know, actually fight.
Not fair. A lot of French fought and died.
Absolutely, but it cannot be denied that traumatized by World War I, the French were no longer the nation of Napoleon or Foch. The success of Fall Gelb had many explanations, but id no less astonishing for that. The British and french had more men, more guns and more tanks than the Germans.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Here's one I shot earlier for Germany. Unfortunately my model is not available at the moment!
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
I think the video revealed by channel 4 today will give many pause for thought.......it's not pretty. I say this as someone who wanted them as the main opposition.
I sincerely apologise to all muppets. Stating you were the equivalent of Reform voters was grossly unfair.
I'm afraid they are our Deplorables - unPC though it is to say it.
You critisise the politicians, you don’t critise the voters. Ask Hillary Clinton.
But this is me. I'm not running for anything. I can tell the truth.
Besides, Hillary Clinton was completely right in what she said and its not why she lost.
She lost because she was an awful campaigner who totally ignored the electoral college and didn't do enough campaigning in the swing flyover states. She spent more time on the coast than in the states that would decide the election.
Biden didn't make the same mistake, so he won a much healthier electoral college vote.
Biden will concentrate on the key states again this year. He knows what he's doing in a way Hillary didn't, which is funny considering her husband's background as Governor of Arkansas and then some other job.
... and that Hillary had made exactly the same error when losing the nomination to Barack Obama in 2008.
ETA scooped by SSI2
My favourites in Hillary vs Trump
1) taking a two week holiday in the Hamptons during the middle of the campaign. 2) blowing off an arranged event with the teaching unions to do a paid speech to Goldman Sucks.
"Biden will concentrate on the key states again this year. He knows what he's doing in a way Hillary didn't, which is funny considering her husband's background as Governor of Arkansas and then some other job."
Bill told Hillary's team that they needed to get their arses to Wisconsin near the end of the campaign. A load of campaign data whiz kids said the info didn't support that and he was the past.
The rest is history which unfortunately we are living in.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
Presumably to give extra mobility when one is on the saddle and in jackboots - nowhere else to put the looser material. No lycra in those days (the mind boggles as to how they would have taken to Lycra, but probably they'd have preferred some sort of modern Fleckmuster or DPM).
Yes - riding has things like the Rising Trot (popular in horsey fascist circles? ), and horses are also controlled using the leg to signal. Plus some mobility is required to mount etc - a seam split is the last thing that would be desirable whilst swinging a leg over a horse.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Care to point me towards some academic papers to back up that unsubstantiated claim?
I think it's made-up nonsense
AFAIK, there are three possible objectives for unions: Maximise 1) the number of people in employment 2) the total pay to workers 3) the average pay per worker
So it's possible that Unions have cost some individuals some money if they tried to achieve options 1 or 2. There are good arguments for all 3, depending on the economic circumstance.
The problem for us was due to capping our payrise to theirs the unions basically cut new products to a trickle as more and more lab staff left. When I finally quit for example I got the same job at a different company and my pay doubled because our pay had fallen far behind industry standard due to the capping
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
I think the British army in 1939 was the only fully motorised one.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
True, but the bigger problems was a complete lack of modern communications through the army, a plan for war based on 1915-1917 (trenches mark II) and a massive reluctance to, you know, actually fight.
No, the French fought bravely, indeed quite fiercely. They were simply poorly led, and trained for the wrong style of war.
I am not getting a lot of joy out of this election but the thing I find most irritating is the number of muppets minded to vote for Reform and, indirectly, 10 years of socialist government. There have been suggestions for a while that IQs are falling but this is a jump off a tall bridge.
You begin to wonder if democracy is just too hard for some people.
Question - what is the difference between "socialist government" and the Conservatives?
Punative taxes to record levels? Tick Wasting billions on crap public services? Tick Open door migration letting anyone in? Tick Nanny state nonsense about what we eat and smoke? Tick
People don't fear "socialist government" or any of the idiotic threats Sunak and the press team are making, because we live that every day already.
The Overton window is so narrow there is almost nothing substantive to discuss. Once you have a welfare state, free state education, NHS, industrial policy, consumer protection, regulation about everything, and a few other things a social democrat state with highly regulated capitalism is the only option. State managed expenditure has increased every year and this will continue. It is unavoidable.
The left have one further option - this + socialist state control of all commerce too. No serious right wing option has emerged with a working model in Europe yet. This is one of the most remarkable and underestimated facts of political policy. The Conservative party's two biggest fails since the war are: Lack of European statecraft, leading to the disaster of Brexit; and the failure to practice conservatism in any respects at all.
Not something I advocate by any means just an observation on all governements of the past
Wars used to cull the poor, now we no longer really have mass casualty wars its a new problem for governements of all stripes to have a burgeoning underclass and they have no idea how to deal with it
More broadly we have a terrible problem with dependency, chiefly due to a combination of low paid employment and ridiculous housing costs (meaning that many working people end up reliant on social security) and vast numbers of pensioners. The situation is theoretically recoverable, but some of the measures required - especially millions of houses and attendant infrastructure, and requiring people to work until 70 or possibly slightly beyond that - are so unpopular that they'll probably never get done. I'll certainly be surprised in a good way of Labour manages to meet its building commitments, and astonished if the houses are decent rather than shoddily constructed little identikit rabbit hutches marooned amidst acres of car parking.
Labour won't meet those targets even if it is their deepest desire, simple fact is there aren't enough construction workers nor the supply of building materials. The problem is exacerbated by the fact we are over the 50% mark for people who take more from the state than they give. For those people voting for more is a no brainer.
As many might have noted I tend rightwards . However I do believe there should be a safety net, free education to 18 and a health service which is free at point of use.
I also believe though that the state does too much and we should trim back what we do. I would rather the state did less but funded it properly than it tries to do too much and half arses everything.
For starters I would do a clawback on state pensions, every 5£ over say 5k private pension should mean 1£ off your state pension
NI on pensions
A lifetime health care costs cap with an insurance based top off
As examples
There is no shortage of skilled tradies in this country who could be building homes if they were easily able to do so without planning restrictions.
Sorry but there is, firms are poaching workers off each other because they can't get enough for example brickies and yes because we don't train enough
Firms poaching off each other is the free market in action.
Nobody has a divine right to minimum wage labour.
Brickies aren't min wage for a while, there just arent enough here to build 300k houses a year, average wage for a brickie now is 20 an hour
We've just been discussing, a quick search for apprentice brickie posts is advertising at £5.28 per hour.
Maybe apprentices should be £12/h and average wages £25?
If you're not able to fill your vacancies, that's because you're either not paying enough, or not offering good enough terms of service.
Thats apprentices and yes to low however you aren't going to ask an apprentice to build a house. We have an apprentice at work and he is a good guy, however we arent getting him to build any software that is going to go anywhere near a customer....same I would imagine for an apprentice brickie, you are teaching him how to not letting him near somewhere someone is going to live in and rely on not falling down. Till he is trained enough he is not an asset but a cost
Not by themselves they won't, but they will go near it yes and do simple work, that's how people learn is by doing under supervision and learning more and more. Starting with the simplest tasks and moving on.
Either way, the only reason that any firm is struggling to hire is its not paying a market rate on wages that meets sees supply of labour meet demand.
But you are talking bollocks by going on about apprentices pay rates when pay rates for actual brickies is 20 an hour on average....now by all means argue apprentice brickies should be paid more to encourage more brickies however actual time served brickies are making reasonable money
Why is £20 "reasonable money" for what we've agreed is a skilled, in-demand job?
Sorry but if you can't fill your shortages, you may need to pay more.
That's supply and demand in action. The free market in action.
20 might not be reasonable money as you state the fact is the last year it has climbed ever higher because there are less brickies than people trying to employ them.
That indicates to me which was the point of my original post that there just aren't enough brickies to build 300k houses. Like fully trained doctors you can't just magic them out of thin air and that is before you even look at the shortage of materials to actually build with.
You can only build as many houses as you have workers and materials for
You can get more workers.
You can train them, by offering more than a fiver an hour to apprentices, who unlike Dixie's dad are nowadays (rightly or wrongly be as it may) qualified after 2 years).
5 years is more than long enough to hire people and get them through a 2 year apprenticeship and get them to work all from start to finish.
So no, its just feeble-mouthed excuses. Pay people a decent rate and they'll do the job.
And, for many trades, mechanise and automate and get more productivity from the workers you have.
(Both simple and difficult to do. Simple in the sense that there are plenty of templates worldwide of how to do this. Difficult because... something is getting in the way and I don't think we know what? A fetishisation of hard work over smart work? A construction model made up of little monopoly projects where there's not much benefit from getting the work done quickly, cheaply and well?)
Bingo!
I know someone who went from being a roofer to building houses, he got enough land to build 3 houses, sold 2 and kept the other 1 and basically made enough from the 2 sold to cover his own house. Like most tradies, he knew and had good working relationships with plenty of other tradies to get things done and not being tied to a monopoly project there were no restrictions, just getting the job done.
There's are plenty of skilled tradies who could be taking the lead in constructing individual homes in this country if we didn't have the planning system that gives consent to Barratt Homes to have a monopoly in the area rather than simply letting everyone who wants to build a home just f***ing do it.
There's nearly 800k people working self-employed in the construction sector alone today. Before any recruitment or apprenticeships.
Incidentally, increasing the number of people employed in construction and related roles is likely to be more productive than protecting legacy industries such as those shops and farmers who struggle to pay workers minimum wage.
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
Collective bargaining has cost a lot of people a lot of pay over the years, though you wont hear unions admit that
Care to point me towards some academic papers to back up that unsubstantiated claim?
I think it's made-up nonsense
AFAIK, there are three possible objectives for unions: Maximise 1) the number of people in employment 2) the total pay to workers 3) the average pay per worker
So it's possible that Unions have cost some individuals some money if they tried to achieve options 1 or 2. There are good arguments for all 3, depending on the economic circumstance.
You're leaving out abuses such as the Closed Shop - abolishing which was one of the excellent things done by Mrs Thatcher.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
I think the British army in 1939 was the only fully motorised one.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
True, but the bigger problems was a complete lack of modern communications through the army, a plan for war based on 1915-1917 (trenches mark II) and a massive reluctance to, you know, actually fight.
Not fair. A lot of French fought and died.
Absolutely, but it cannot be denied that traumatized by World War I, the French were no longer the nation of Napoleon or Foch. The success of Fall Gelb had many explanations, but id no less astonishing for that. The British and french had more men, more guns and more tanks than the Germans.
But the Brits had that magic extra ingredient, the Channel. As for French willingness to fight, consider the thousands of French troops evacuated at Dunkirk who returned to France to be killed or captured when redeployed against the Germans.
Last week it was pro russia appeasement and groveling for Putin, this week it is full on hard nazi style racism and homophobia from main people within reform caught on C4 news hidden camera. I was very disturbed by plans to turn the police into paramilitary, hoping for attacks on Bradford, whating for soldiers to shoot at boats in the channel, references to gassing ethnic minorities... reform is what you get when nazism rebrands itself and puts on a suit. Dear me.
I'd be curious if @state_go_away could watch that and repeat his assertion that me calling Reform a "nasty party of racist bigots" was in his words "hysterical".
There is nothing "hysterical" about calling all that a nasty party of racist bigots, if anything I was far too polite.
They are straight up nazis is suits...
They’re nowhere NEAR as well dressed as the Nazis
Say what you like about the Nazis, and they are certainly political “Marmite”, and a lot of people dislike them, and they’re never going to be everyone’s “cup of tea“, but they were always snappy dressers. Hugo Boss did not strive in vain
The thing I never understand with Nazis is the sideways deflating-balloon trousers, as if they were pretending they had pumped-up bubble-butts and thunder-thighs before these became fashionable.
Do we have any fashion historians here? I'm sure it's related to some historical gesture from the past.
Checking - early jodhpurs, perhaps, since they liked to look back to the Prussian Officer tradition and pretend they had inherited it, rather than being thugs? For Nazis, just like all other symbolic stuff they pinched from elsewhere.
600, 000 horses were involved in the invasion of Poland so riding was a real thing, not an affectation. Actually they're just riding breeches, and very practical for riding in.
Almost none of those horses were for riding though, they were the horse power of the heer, whereas the Allies tended to use artificial horsepower…
I think the British army in 1939 was the only fully motorised one.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
True, but the bigger problems was a complete lack of modern communications through the army, a plan for war based on 1915-1917 (trenches mark II) and a massive reluctance to, you know, actually fight.
Not fair. A lot of French fought and died.
Absolutely, but it cannot be denied that traumatized by World War I, the French were no longer the nation of Napoleon or Foch. The success of Fall Gelb had many explanations, but id no less astonishing for that. The British and french had more men, more guns and more tanks than the Germans.
But the Brits had that magic extra ingredient, the Channel. As for French willingness to fight, consider the thousands of French troops evacuated at Dunkirk who returned to France to be killed or captured when redeployed against the Germans.
I'm being rather unfair on thousands of gallant Frenchmen and women, of course. But I think it is true to say that France and Germany reacted very differently to WW1.
Actually, this is a good point. If Farage is “political Marmite”, what was Hitler?
For me he was “political Nutella”. Personally, I can’t stand Nutella, but a lot of people like it, especially Germans
vegemite surely as he was a vegetarian
Farage is a veggie?!
I’m talking about Hitler being political Nutella. And I think that’s pretty spot on, and if any Nutella execs are reading, they can have this for free, and swap it around for their advertising
“Nutella, it’s the Hitler of spreads! Not for everyone, but Germans like it”
Here's one I shot earlier for Germany. Unfortunately my model is not available at the moment!
That can't be one of yours there is a lack of tampons
I tried to get him to wear a tampon but he wouldn't so we did it without.
Always handy to have in case he had a nose bleed
Is that add with the rather large Ice skating woman one of yours then ?
My second most hated current advert. Closely behind the dreadful blond Irish woman selling washing powder by exploiting her kids. Do they get paid? A nation is (not) desperate to know.
Theyve all been chucked out with immediate effect. How long did it take Sunak to suspend the [alleged] inside bettors?
The problem is racists in reform is like a hydra, you dispose of one, two more come in its place
Heil Hydra!
"You are deluded, Captain. You pretend to be a simple soldier, but in reality you are just afraid to admit that we have left humanity behind. Unlike you, I embrace it proudly. Without fear!"
Other than Corbyn being defeated the SNP getting gubbed and Scottish independence being killed stone dead for a generation will be the Tory highlight next week.
Robert the Bruce survived being beaten seven times and eventually triumphed.
ITV News: Labour worried about a dozen seats with large Muslim electorates where they're concerned their majority may be slashed or even lost altogether.
Last nights comment by SKS won't have helped.
Does this mean that Gorgeous Georges Workers Party might win a few seats
ANME update: we've now had a leaflet from Reform. So that's all the main parties: Conservative, SNP, Lib Dem, and Reform. Still not a peep out of Labour.
Why would they campaign for a candidate they have suspended? Do you mean SKS is really a duplicitous, conniving fraud?
The only chance he has of staying out of jail, is throwing the whole PO management under the bus.
I don’t think that will help - it may have done on Tuesday but yesterday and today was Jenkins being destroyed email by email
No, he was bang to rights well before his appearance before the Inquiry. Simply giving false testimony as an expert witness would be enough to get you on a perjury charge. Even the Plod have noticed this and have interviewed him as a suspect. The only reason he hasn't been charged is because they have been waiting for the Inquiry to conclude. In his testimony too he has perjured himself again numerous times, so it's hard to see why the police would not charge him as he walks out of the hearing tomorrow afternoon. It's a very simple nick if they want it.
He could have turned King's evidence of course. He may yet do that when he is charged. (i think it is when, not if.) He may be a bit more forthcoming in front of a judge and jury. He was plainly being used as a Patsy, albeit a willing one. He could get quite a lot off his sentence if he were to identify more clearly who exactly was playing him. However, so far his strategy has been to hide what he thought he could get away with.
it hasn't worked very well, so maybe it's time for him to try a different approach.
This is the Milgram experiment but for real. I am pretty sure many of the perps had private misgivings but thought they had to go along with the instructions of the grown ups.
That's very perceptive.
It may well go a long way towards explaining Jenkins' behaviour, and indeed many others. There are some however who appear to have been plainly cynical if not malicious. Off the top of my head I would cite Alice Perkins and John Scott. Numerous lawyers, in-house and external (some very senior), fit the bill. Vennells is probably borderline - more of an overpromoted middle-manager who was intoxicated by landing the top job and blinkered herself to the ugly reality of what was going on in the firm.
At the end of the day though, what they all did was wrong and they should all be charged. It will be a massively difficult and a hit-or-miss process but if it is not done it gives the green light to far too much casual misconduct in the workplace, and disregard for consequences.
Ah yes, Alice Perkins who lives in New Zealand now and, amazingly, refused to cooperate with the inquiry, even though it would been easy to do so via video link.
You're mixing her up with Jane MacLeod, Andy, but both should be charged, and Macleod extradited if necessary.
Watching Gareth Jenkins today, you actually feel slightly sorry for him. He comes across as a rather sympathetic and naive figure.
There has just been a long conversation about this in the PtP household, Andy!
I'll spare you the details but I definitely agree wth Nick Wallis's obsevation that he was either criminally negligent or an unholy fool. The weight of evidence points to the former. As Wallis has pointed out, if you or I were given any kind of evidence which could have a bearing on someone going to prison, we would be very careful to give a balanced as well as accurate account. We would do so simply as a matter of civilised courtesy and honesty, regardless of whether we were 'special' witnesses or not. Yet he quite literally sat by whilst SPMs were arraigned with evidence he knew fell well short of the whole truth.
Damned by his own testimony, I'm afraid.
There is a strong sense with this Inquiry of people getting caught up in processes they don't really understand. I've seen this quite a bit in my career, people get dragged in to legal proceedings and are told what to say and do by their employer. If you don't want to go along with it then you have to quit your job.
Comments
Let's start having more competition for labour. And firms can pay, automate or die. And yes that means paying more for roles that are more labour intensive such as social care (automation generally just means poor care there).
... I'd actually extend it to the public sector where I'd scrap national pay scales and negotiate wages like every other company in the country. At an individual level or at a much smaller scale (e.g. union negotiates on behalf of midwives at a single hospital, not nationally).
We need a more efficient pricing mechanism of labour in much of our economy.
It seemed strange at the time, and isn't looking any less so now.
But it's still an opportunity to see what the parties believe to be the most significant issues, and how they present that issue and potential solutions (or do not present or offer such solutions) will play a role in how they take action or defend action in the future, even though it will not be the most significant factor.
To take an example, the Tories did not promise or explain that they would be changing mayoral voting systems to FPTP in 2019. But they did say they would defend it, and that factored into how they justified making the change despite not having it as an actual pledge.
Labour's manifesto has a few clear promises which they must either believe to be achievable and which can be used against them if not, but otherwise a lot of vagueness and generalities, giving weight to some critics saying there are many things they might ended up doing. It's first main section was about national security and strong borders, which shows us something about how they sought to change their image.
The LDs opened on the economy, the Greens on housing of all things, and so on. It tells us something at least about focus.
Certainly! The Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, has launched its manifesto for the 2024 general election, titled “Our Contract With You.” Here are some key policies:
Immigration: Reform UK aims to freeze non-essential immigration, with exceptions for healthcare workers. It plans to ban students from bringing partners and children to the UK. The party also pledges to address small boats smuggling migrants across the Channel.
Tax Cuts: The party proposes significant tax cuts for small businesses, including a corporation tax-free allowance of £100k in profits and raising the VAT registration threshold for businesses to £150k. Business rates would be abolished for small and medium-sized firms on the high street, funded by a 4% online delivery tax for large multinationals.
Climate Targets: Reform UK would scrap net-zero targets, claiming it could save £30 billion annually. It also plans to stop paying interest on bonds held at the Bank of England, resulting in a £35 billion annual raid on banks123.
In summary, Reform UK’s manifesto focuses on immigration control, tax relief for small businesses, and challenging climate targets. However, critics argue that some policies may be hard to implement14. 🗳️
Is that add with the rather large Ice skating woman one of yours then ?
1) taking a two week holiday in the Hamptons during the middle of the campaign.
2) blowing off an arranged event with the teaching unions to do a paid speech to Goldman Sucks.
One reason for the difficulties that the French had in 1940 was that their combat engineers were mostly horse drawn.
Go collective bargaining
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackboot
Bill Clinton is younger than both Biden and Trump and he was President 30 years ago.
Goodnight only7 sleeps to SKSICIPM
But that anecdote isn’t about collective pay it’s about the consequences of incompetent management
Remember a lot of companies have unions were for many years (until equal pay rules get very inflexible) warehouse staff were paid more than shop floor staff in the same building .
(Not that there is not still waste, but if it were that easy to do there'd already be a lot less of it).
NEW THREAD
Enough
So it's possible that Unions have cost some individuals some money if they tried to achieve options 1 or 2. There are good arguments for all 3, depending on the economic circumstance.
Bill told Hillary's team that they needed to get their arses to Wisconsin near the end of the campaign. A load of campaign data whiz kids said the info didn't support that and he was the past.
The rest is history which unfortunately we are living in.
Indeed much the same as the BEF.
NEW THREAD
As for French willingness to fight, consider the thousands of French troops evacuated at Dunkirk who returned to France to be killed or captured when redeployed against the Germans.
It’s this vile entitled rich person
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/vogue-williams-flight-seats-spencer-matthews-b2150116.html
A thread based on an unweighted subsample that is not in itself Scottish yet references Scotland.
Assume this is Peak PB?
Does this mean that Gorgeous Georges Workers Party might win a few seats